15. War Beasts From The South

For this battle I had no less than 3 Mumaks; one of which was the Mumak War Leader himself, along with a load of Haradrim guys in the Howdahs (none of which were provided with bows for some reason, which I’ll never understand, as it means there’s no point them being there – unless you’re supposed to play WYSIWYG on a per model basis in these campaigns?).

Sai had 24 Riders of Rohan, along with some of the usual suspects: Theoden, Eomer, Dernhelm, Gamling with the cheat banner, and Deorwine.

A key point in this one was that Sai’s force would not suffer Terror from the Mumaks, as they are desperate to kill them.

The mission was I had to squash 75% of Sai’s forces. Sai had to kill all 3 Mumaks.

One turn in: No big tricks here!

I cautiously dithered forward, fearing a mass charge, but Sai did the the usual non-Rohan thing of sitting back and having a bit of a shoot. Nothing much went down.

I drew closer, Sai shot again, nothing much resulted from it…

Ha ha I trample you / oh wait

The War Leader managed to catch a couple of guys in a trample, but was rewarded with half of Sai’s army counter charging. There was no going back now

The second (very proxied) Mumak stumbled in to try and help out

The third Mumak on the right also got swarmed by Riders before he could do much. The struggle now was that (from memory) Sai had spread his characters very effectively, meaning the two non awesome Mumaks were losing fights most of the time. I think I was pretty low on winning priorty as well – it wouldn’t of mattered anyway because good old Gamiling was re-fuelling Sai’s Heroes’ might, so Heroic Moves were the order of the day, keeping my Muaks pinned down (so no trampling) and then slowly hacking them apart. Actually it wasn’t that slow!

I suffered one (or maybe 2) stampedes from taking wounds, but as the Mumaks were never out of combat, it made no difference.

Bedlam!

We proved the previous theory as well in this game: when a Mumak dies, everyone who was riding it pretty much dies as well due to falling damage. I think about 3 out of 36 guys survived the inevitable fall from the Mumaks!

A non-trampling Mumak doesn’t win fights very often, and doesn’t kill many models when it does (3 Attacks), and so one by one the Mumaks succumbed. Fair play!

“I told you we should have fitted airbags to the beast”

Eventually the War Leader was knocked off his perch, and being a bit battered from the fall and an earlier arrow to the knee, he was short work for Rohan’s finest. It was all over!